Although a large population of users have already migrated away from Internet Explorer, Microsoft Windows' built-in browser still dominates at large, for better or for worse. Its latest iteration, IE7 is still a very decent browser although with more recent releases of Firefox, Opera and Safari, Microsoft has once again fell behind in terms of features, customization and perhaps most importantly, performance.
The software giant has been touting all year long the progress they have been making with Internet Explorer 8, however with their latest beta 1 release they demonstrated they were far from reaching the stability and usability point where you can actually use the browser as your primary navigation tool. Even worse, it tended to break many many sites.
The IE development team announced today on their blog the public release of IE8 Beta 2. The browser is available for 32 and 64-bit versions of Windows Vista, XP, Windows Server 2003, and Server 2008. There is a long list of improved and added features on the Beta 2 which you can see here. In short, the development team claims this version of the browser is now ready for public consumption as long as you can live with the occasional yet mandatory bug you will find on non-final code.
If you are anything like us and enjoy tinkering with new browsers just for the fun of it, go grab a look.